Authors: Patrick Robinson
This morning, the air was clear, the helicopter was unarmed, and it was already hot. Tony Tilton was the only passenger, aside from the three-man crew. They lifted off almost vertically, then clattered their way north up Puget Sound, about 3,000 feet above the water, for the ten-minute journey.
They descended gently through windless skies and put down on the helicopter pad at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, around 30 miles north of the Seattle downtown area, the same distance from the sprawling U.S. Naval Base at Everett.
One crew member disembarked immediately and assisted their civilian passenger down the steps to the area beside the runway. Less than 30 yards away stood a Lockheed EP-3E Aries Naval jet, its engines running, steps down, ready for Mr. Tilton’s arrival.
He climbed aboard, a young officer came back to ensure that he was strapped in, and they moved forward to the takeoff area immediately. One half-minute later, they were in the air, screaming
off the runway, scything into the hot, muggy air above the calm U.S. Navy waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait.
Fourteen minutes earlier, Tony had been standing on the sidewalk on 6th Avenue, right outside the National Bank Building.
“Christ, I’ve waited up longer than this in Boston just for a shuttle ticket,” remarked Tony, as the aircraft made a steep left-hand turn, and, still climbing, headed resolutely inland, east, making 450 mph over the rapidly disappearing ground.
The Navy Lieutenant sitting next to him laughed. “Guess so, sir,” he said. “It’s just that in our game, we don’t usually have a lot of time to fuck about. We’re very big on speed. Would you like some coffee?”
The Bank President gratefully accepted, as they set off over the high peaks of the Cascade Range. Their route would take them southeast across Montana and Wyoming, over the Rockies, along the Nebraska-Kansas border, then due east, south of Cincinnati, into Washington, D.C.
During the six-hour journey, the Navy Lieutenant came up with more coffee and a beef sandwich, and they touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, southeast of the capital, at 6
P.M
. local.
A black Navy staff car awaited them and the driver took Tony’s bag, slung it on the front seat, and opened the rear door for the man who had escaped the wrath of Mount St. Helens.
Moments later, they were headed fast up to Route 95, and on to the beltway. They drove all around the north side of the city, got off at Exit 33, and into the tony suburb of Chevy Chase. The remainder of the journey took five minutes, and Admiral Morgan’s agents met them inside the gateway of the grand Colonial-style house where the former National Security Adviser lived with his new(ish) wife, Kathy.
It was just 6:45 on a hot summer evening, and the Admiral was dressed in white Bermudas with a dark blue polo shirt and straw panama. He greeted Tony Tilton warmly and thanked him for coming. Harry came over and volunteered to take the visitor upstairs to his room, and Arnold told Tony to come back down right away so they could have a couple of drinks.
Tilton changed out of his blazer and tie, put on a dark green polo shirt, and headed back out to the wide patio by the pool.
The Admiral was sitting in a big, comfortable chair and he motioned for Tony to join him. The drinks were on a table between them, and both men took a man-sized swig at the cool, relaxing Scotch whisky.
“I expect Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe filled you in on why we wanted you in Washington?”
“He did…the meeting tomorrow morning in the Pentagon, I believe.”
“Correct. But I should give you some more info…and first I better know, if you don’t mind…May I presume you’re a Republican?”
“You may.”
“Thought so. West Coast banker. Capitalist. Red in tooth and claw. Would you say you’re rightish, or leftish?”
“Rightish. We have a very Republican State these days. Full of independent people, entrepreneurs and dyed-in-the-wool, self-sufficient country boys wary of Washington, paranoid about the present Administration. East Coast liberals don’t play well out where I live. No sir.”
“That’s awful good to hear,” replied the Admiral. “You can imagine what it’s like in the Pentagon right now?”
“Sure can.”
“Which bring us right back to Mount St. Helens. Can I call you ‘Tony’?”
“Of course.”
“I’m a civilian now. So that’ll be Arnie to you…anyway, Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe tells me you understand perfectly well we have the gravest suspicion about that particular eruption.”
“Well, he was on the line from one of the most important government agencies in the country, asking me in great detail about those two blasts of wind on that still morning by the lake…I mean, there must be suspicion…It’s difficult to arrive at any other conclusion…”
“Not if you work in the Oval Office,” growled the Admiral.
Tony Tilton chuckled. “I should tell you, Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe did not reveal anything else about his investigation. I merely surmised what he was getting at.”
“I understand,” said the Admiral. “But because I believe you’re someone we can trust, I’ll give you a little more background, and then have you explain to me, all over again, exactly what you observed on that Sunday morning. Then I shall request you tell precisely the same thing to the meeting tomorrow morning.”
“No problem.”
“Okay, Tony Tilton. Have another slug of that Dewars and pay attention…”
“Lay it on me, Admiral.”
“Arnie.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Tony, shaking his head. “These habits of formality…hard to shake in my trade…May I have your account number…?”
This was too much for the Admiral, who burst into laughter, and then had another slug of Dewars himself. A few minutes later, Morgan finished by concluding:
“A submarine. Do you follow me?”
“I surely do, Arnie. And you think what I heard were those missiles?”
“Yes, I do, Tony. That’s precisely what I think.”
“Can you launch them from below the surface? More than one at a time?”
“Oh, sure. They’re called SLCMs—submarine-launched cruise missiles. You can get ’em away one at a time, but close together, separated by perhaps less than a minute. They make a heck of a speed, well over 600 knots, flying maybe 500 feet above the ground.”
“How come they didn’t crash into the mountains up there?”
“They self-adjust to the contours of the earth, rising and falling on the instructions of their own altimeter.”
“And you think I heard them come in?”
“I think you heard the first two…”
“If it’d been the last two, I don’t think we’d have made it out of there.”
“Can you tell me exactly what you heard?”
“I’m afraid it can’t be much more than I told Don McKeag or Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe…”
And just then the French doors slid open, and Mrs. Kathy Morgan made her entrance, walking briskly, wearing a pink floral Italian cotton skirt with a pink summer shirt, no shoes, and a gold anchor pendant on a chain around her neck. Her lustrous red hair was worn loosely and she carried a large platter that, still marinating boldly, held a large butterflied leg of lamb.
This was, unaccountably, her husband’s favorite—Texans, of course, are supposed to demonstrate the cattleman’s traditional devotion to beef, harboring at all times the cowboy’s general derision of the efforts of sheep farmers.
But Arnold loved butterflied leg of lamb and, much to Tony Tilton’s good fortune, liked it especially on Sunday nights, when he gleefully opened a couple of bottles of outstanding château-bottled Bordeaux, as carefully recommended by his Chief Adviser, the former Secretary of State Harcourt Travis, now lecturing modern political history, somewhat loftily, to students at Harvard University.
Admiral Morgan introduced his wife to the star witness for the prosecution, and poured her a glass of cold white Burgundy.
“Arnold’s been telling me, Tony, how you got away from the volcano,” she said. “That must have been very scary…I think I would probably have fainted with terror.”
“Kathy, when you’re as scared as I was, it’s amazing what you can do,” replied her guest. “The morning was very quiet. No wind, just a few people camping around the lake, not more than a half dozen tents. Nearly everyone was asleep. There was a mist across the water, a high mist, not just a sea-fret. You could see neither upwards nor across the lake. It was one of those soft, silent times you can get out in the wilderness in the early morning. So quiet, you found yourself talking softly, even my buddy Don, and he’s trained to lambaste the world with his opinions.”
Arnold Morgan chortled and took another sip of Dewars. “Keep going, Tony,” he said. “I’m enjoying this.”
“Anyway, I heard this sudden wind. Not quite a howl, you know, nothing theatrical. But a real creepy wailing sound, more like that rise in sound you get in an old house when there’s a storm outside.
“It was about as weird as a sound can be…
wh-o-o-o-o-sh!
On a dead-still morning. And it was not a sound that was static where we were, it was passing us by, as if heading into the mountain. I found myself looking upwards towards the peak, and then there was this deep thumping sound from way up there, like an underground explosion…Moments later I heard the goddamned noise again.”
“How long, Tony?”
“Not as long as a minute. But close. And I heard it sweep past. Same sound. In a split second, I was looking up over the lake, but there was nothing, not even a movement in the mist. But the sound was identical. And ten seconds later there was another explosion from Mount St. Helens. This one was a much more open sound, a real crash…you know…
KERRRR-BAM!
Like you’d imagine a bomb, although I’ve never heard one.”
“And then?”
“I started up the wagon and we took off. That’s when we heard the third explosion. That one was real loud, and suddenly there was fire and ash raining into the forest around us. Trees were on fire and God knows what. We just kept going, driving faster than I’ve ever driven in my life.
“The fourth explosion was bigger than all the other three put together—we didn’t see it, but the road shook. And then it began to get dark…tons and tons of ash and debris flung into the atmosphere, I suppose. Kind of blotted out the sun. If I hadn’t seen that sucker blow all those years ago, I guess I’d still have been standing gawping at Mount St. Helens when the lava started down the mountain. It just swallows everything.”
“Including the half-gallon of Dewars, according to your man McKeag,” chuckled Arnold.
“Yeah. Just imagine…one small section of volcanic rock, amber in color, in the middle of all that gray…Dewar’s Rock. Now that’s a landmark.”
“According to Don McKeag’s program, you might be running for state governor in a couple of years,” said Arnold. “Could be your first major act on environmental issues…renaming the rock at the foot of Mount St. Helens.”
1030, Monday, August 24
Second Floor, The Pentagon.
One by one, they filed into the private conference room of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. There was Adm. George Morris and Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe. Adm. Alan Dickson; Rear Adm. Freddie Curran; Admiral Morgan; and Tony Tilton. Gen. Scannell had invited the Air Force Chief, Gen. Cale Carter, plus Maj. Gen. Bart Boyce, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, and Gen. Stanford Hudson (Readiness Command, U.S. Army).
No politicians were present. But as military brainpower goes, this was a solid roomful, deep in the most secretive inner sanctum of Pentagon planning, directly above the office of President McBride’s dovish Secretary of State for Defense, Milt Schlemmer, formerly of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The man’s name alone brought Arnold Morgan out in hives.
There were only two men from outside the U.S. Military’s High Command—an Air Force colonel from U.S. Aerospace Command HQ, who waited in the reception area with Tony Tilton. Positioned outside the office were two Marine Corps guards, with four others on extra duty in Corridor Seven, which leads directly to E-Ring, the great circular outer thruway of the Pentagon.
The ten men sat at the large conference table, and General Scannell called the meeting to order by informing everyone this was a gathering of the most highly classified nature, and that no
one—repeat, no one—was to be informed that it had even been convened.
For reasons that would become obvious, he declared that Admiral Morgan would chair the meeting, and he cited Arnold’s long and detailed involvement in the subject. He also explained that Adm. George Morris had been “on the case” for several months, and that Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, the Fort Meade Director’s assistant, had “essentially made the running throughout the unofficial investigation.”
General Scannell had issued only the most cursory briefing by coded E-mail to the senior officers around the table. But each man sufficiently understood the grave suspicion that now surrounded the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and each man had been furnished with a copy of the letter from Hamas, demanding the United States’ formal evacuation from the Middle East.
“Each of you understands,” said General Scannell, “the distinct likelihood that the crater, high on Mount St. Helens, was hit by four oncoming cruise missiles on the morning of August 9. Only one man was near enough to bear any kind of witness to this event, at least only one man who survived. And he is with us this morning—Mr. Tony Tilton, the President of the Seattle National Bank.
“Now, because I would like to fly him home as soon as possible, I am inviting him to speak to us and explain exactly what he witnessed in the foothills of Mount St. Helens on that morning. Mr. Tilton has already debriefed Admiral Morgan, so I invite Arnold to steer our visitor through his account of the incident.”
Admiral Morgan introduced Tony formally to the group, and then invited him to recount, in precise detail, everything he had told him on the previous evening. And he did so with a lawyer’s clarity. At the conclusion of his story, Admiral Morgan asked if anyone would like to ask Mr. Tilton any further questions, but there were none. The bank chief and the former National Security Adviser had, between them, delivered a detailed, virtuosic performance.